


Migraines

by MagicMage



Series: Joshua Shepard [6]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Fluff, M/M, non-canon Shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 18:34:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2632019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicMage/pseuds/MagicMage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joshua comes home from grocery shopping to find that Kaidan has a really terrible migraine, and naturally spends the rest of the evening taking care of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Migraines

**Author's Note:**

> Needed some writing therapy and this idea's been bouncing around in my head for a while, so here it is. If you read the "Don't Say I Love You" fic you'll probably notice some stark contrasts between this and what happened in the second chapter with Kaidan in the mess-hall.

It became abundantly clear the moment he came into their apartment that something wasn’t quite right.

He’d been expecting Kaidan to arrive back from his day of work at the military base while he was gone, because he’d been putting off grocery shopping, and so he wasn’t surprised that Kaidan’s shoes were by the door, or that he was on the couch. But the sun shade had been pulled down over the main window in the living room, usually open so that they could see into the city. 

The entire living room was dark. Automatically Joshua became hyper aware of the noises that the bags he was carrying were making. He didn’t even bring them into the kitchen, he just set them down on the floor above the steps down into the living room and approached Kaidan who was lying on the couch.

His eyes were closed, but it was clear from the pained look on his face that he wasn’t sleeping. Joshua knelt by him on the floor, reaching out to gently run his finger from Kaidan’s eyebrow to his temple.

“Is it bad?” he asked softly, looking around to try and figure out if he could make the room darker.

“Mmm,” Kaidan groaned, cracking his eyes open just a bit. “Yeah…hurts.”

Joshua hated these. Kaidan didn’t get migraines as much anymore, especially when he hadn’t been using his biotics very much. But maybe they’d been doing a demonstration on the base or something else which had triggered the headache.

“Did you take anything yet?” He genuinely hated making noises when Kaidan was like this, knowing just about everything made it worse, but he needed to know or else Kaidan would just lay there for hours in silent pain.

“No jus…jus’ made the room darker,” Kaidan explained, his words slurred slightly.

Joshua sighed, running his fingers back through Kaidan’s hair and looking at the light which was still coming in from the dining room. The window on that side of the house didn’t have a sun shade and the curtains were sheer white. Curtains didn’t really need to be thick when you lived on the top floor of a high rise, rich people apartment (or really condo) complex.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Kaidan softly, standing up and quietly going to the kitchen. As soon as he entered the kitchen he went over to the door which connected the dining room and the kitchen and rolled it shut, creating just a bit less light.

He set about finding the pain killers, which were always somewhere in the cupboards beside their fridge. It was a good thing that Chawkas called them up every once in a while to make sure there were more in their house. They’d probably forget to replenish them, Kaidan’s headaches had become so rare, and then Kaidan really would have to suffer in the dark for several hours.

After fetching the pills, and a large glass of water, he headed back to the living room. He rolled the giant wooden door from the kitchen to the hallway closed behind him, as quietly as he could. He returned to the living room and sat in the small space beside Kaidan on the couch, he looked down at him in concern. He really wished he could take the pain from him, it was hard to watch him suffer like he was.

“Hey, I got the medicine.”

Kaidan covered his face with his hands, rubbing them into his cheeks and then down his face. “Can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Medicine.”

Joshua’s lips quirked up at the side. Whenever he’d seen Kaidan get sick like this on the Normandy he’d always maintained a _pretty_ upstanding persona, still acting like a soldier even when Chakwas had to darken the medbay and he ended up lying on a bed for several hours. Sometimes he hadn’t been entirely coherent once it got really bad, and usually he was irritable from start to finish, but he’d behaved like an adult and endured it for the most part.

Once they’d started living together, however, everything had changed. Kaidan hated the headaches with every fiber of his being and sometimes he acted like a sick child more than a sick man who was several years older than him. But Joshua was totally okay with that.

“You have to,” Joshua told him gently, slipping off of the couch and onto the floor so that he could set the water and pills on the table and move up to sit by Kaidan’s head on the floor again. “Come on, sit up just a bit.”

Kaidan groaned.

Joshua glanced up in the direction of their bedroom, thinking about how much easier it would be it they were in there. Their bedroom didn’t have any windows for some reason, and so he could just shut off the lights and it would be pitch black.

“If you go up to your room it’ll be darker you know,” Joshua suggested. “And there’s pillows, so we can prop you up and you can take the medicine.”

He brushed his fingers through Kaidan’s hair again, to which Kaidan responded by taking hold of his hand and nuzzling his cheek into the palm. Joshua smiled, thumbing his cheek bone gently.

“Mm…don’t wanna…move.”

Joshua pressed his lips together, trying to think of both a way to make the room darker, and a way to convince Kaidan to take the stupid pills. He stood up again, gently tugging his hand away only to Kaidan’s slight protest and headed up to their room.

He grabbed several pillows, and the blanket which they put on the bed when it was too warm to use their thick comforter and then wandered back down the stairs. Kaidan had, oddly enough, taken the medication when he got back down. He dropped the blanket on the floor between the living room and the dining room and went to deliver the pillows to his lover.

“Okay, sit up a bit I got some pillows for you,” Joshua told him softly, helping him sit up and inserting the correct amount of pillows between Kaidan’s head and the couch so that he was reclined.

Kaidan cracked his eyes open again and looked at him with an exhausted, but loving, expression on his face. “I love you,” he muttered.

“I love you too,” Joshua replied. “But wait a minute, I have to do something else.” He got up again, going to the thin brown blanket on the floor and looking scrutinisingly at the window in the dining room. The blanket was luckily made out of a fabric which would mostly block out what the thin, sheer, curtains were not managing to. He just had to figure out how to get it to stay on the window. He looked down at the blanket again, and then at the window, and went to his study to grab several safety pins.

Safety pins were amazingly useful things to have around, no matter how outdated a technology they were.

He returned to the blanket, picked it up, and went into the dining room to turn the blanket into a makeshift curtain. It wasn’t too hard, all he had to do was pin the edges of each end of the blanket over on the curtain rod so that they’d stay, and then do the same in the middle. The only issue was that he needed to pull a chair around to reach properly, which was going to create some noise.

He glanced over his shoulder, trying to decide whether the noise would be worth it in the long run and seeing Kaidan’s figure on the couch. It would definitely the worth it, if he could make the room darker.

So he set about his task, trying really hard to make as little noise as possible as he dragged the chair around and swore a few times when the pin wouldn’t go quite where it was supposed to and the blanket ended up falling, but _finally_ after about ten minutes of fumbling around the room was plunged into mostly darkness. He could see still, the light still managing to sneak around the edges of the blanket, but it definitely wasn’t that awful light and dark contrast if one looked in the wrong direction.

He went back to the couch, sitting on the coffee table and looked over his resting lover.

“What’d you do?” Kaidan asked, looking over in the direction of the dining room questioningly.

“Made a curtain, now get some sleep,” he told him, running his knuckles gently down the side of his face. “I’m going to make dinner.”

“Don’t want to eat.”

“I’m going to make dinner anyways,” Joshua told him. He’d need to eat eventually, even if it was just basic stuff. Joshua wasn’t the best cook, and he knew that, but he’d learnt enough from Kaidan and his own research in their time together to take care of a few meals a month.

Kaidan groaned again, rolling onto his side to face the couch.

Quietly he went back to the entrance, picking up the grocery bags he’d set down previously and going into the kitchen without opening the door to wide so that none of the light could escape through.

He set about making dinner. Luckily some of the things he needed they already had, or he would have had to go and get them. He pulled out the salmon Kaidan had already been planning to cook for dinner, some spinach, some potatoes, and some mushrooms. Then he looked up a good recipe on his omnitool and set about making coffee as well.

Once the mushrooms and the potatoes were in the oven, and the water for the spinach was set to boil on the stove, he poured Kaidan his coffee and a class of water. He took both to him, trying to make as little noise as possible opening and closing the wooden door again and finding that Kaidan was on his back on the couch again.

He’d been hoping that he was sleeping, but as he approached Kaidan’s eyes opened.

“I already have a glass of water,” Kaidan told him softly. Joshua smiled affectionately down at him.

“Well then, I guess you’ll just have to drink both of them,” he replied, with equal softness. He set both cups down next to his first and then took the first and held it out to him. The fact that Kaidan was already more coherent was a good sign. Kaidan took the glass and sat up just a bit more to drink what was left of it from taking his pills. He handed it back and Joshua took it.

“What’re you cooking?” Kaidan asked.

“Are you hungry?”

Kaidan made a face, and shook his head slightly before wincing and lying back down again.

“Are you cold?”

“Too many questions, Joshua,” Kaidan complained, running a hand down his face roughly and then pinching the bridge of his nose.

Joshua shook his head slightly, but shrugged off Kaidan’s complaint and went to deliver the cup to the dishwasher. Once he’d added the salmon in with the mushrooms and potatoes he went up to their room and grabbed the comforter off of the bed.

He returned to the living room to find Kaidan sitting up and sipping the coffee, so he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders.

“You have to eat something you know,” he said softly, to which Kaidan replied with pulled the blanket tighter around himself, putting the coffee cup on the table, and lying back down on the couch in a whisper of blankets and the comforter released the air in it.

“No,” he said simply, snuggling further into the couch.

Joshua shook his head, knowing that a lack of food was probably what had triggered the headache anyways. Without Chakwas to constantly feed protein bars into his hands and lectures of calorie intake into his ears, Kaidan tended to let his nutritional intake slide. Joshua started heading back to the kitchen, but Kaidan protested softly.

“No, stay here,” he whined. Joshua turned back to him.

“Sweetheart, I’m making dinner,” he told him gently. He only really used the pet names when Kaidan wasn’t feeling well, he didn’t know why but at any other time he ended up red faced and embarrassed.

Kaidan reached up with his arm. “Come back,” he whined.

Joshua looked back in the direction of the kitchen. He’d set the water to boil on a low temperature so it wouldn’t boil too quickly, and he didn’t need to do anything else with the fish for at least 15 minutes. He sighed, turning back to the couch and allowing Kaidan to tug him down on top of the blanket beside him. There wasn’t really enough space on the couch for both of them to lie beside each other, but Joshua was okay with sort of hovering between the couch and the coffee table.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked softly, wrapping an arm around the cocoon which was Kaidan.

“Like I took the entire Normandy to my head,” Kaidan told him, snuggling against him and burying his face into his shirt. “Your shirt’s soft.”

Joshua chuckled softly. “Eh…thanks I guess.” Joshua snaked his other arm under Kaidan’s neck and gently ran his fingers over his amp port. Kaidan shivered. “This is a really bad one, huh?” Joshua asked softly, tugging Kaidan to him and squeezing him for a moment before relenting. He wanted him to feel better so badly.

“Mmm…it’s starting to go away I think…” Kaidan muttered, nuzzling against him again. Joshua smiled, though Kaidan couldn’t really see it.

They lay in silence from then until Joshua’s internal timer told him he needed to get up and check on the food. “I gotta get back to dinner,” he told Kaidan gently, pulling away and detangling himself from him.

Kaidan whined, but pulled his blankets over his head.

“Drink your water,” Joshua added over his shoulder as he headed back to the kitchen. Luckily working in the military had made his internal timer almost second to none. If he wasn’t paying any attention time could fly by, but generally he had a very good grip of time when it came to time sensitive activities and the like. He came into the kitchen just as his omnitool timer, previously left on the counter, started going off.

He set the spinach to boil and began his work on finishing up the salmon, mixing up a bunch of things in a bowl for a sort of sauce. It was once he had finished drizzling the sauce over the salmon and vegetables that he heard the door to the kitchen pushed open.

He turned around to see Kaidan standing in the doorway with the blankets still wrapped around him, looking irritable and holding the empty cup of water he’d left behind.

“I drank it,” he grumbled. Joshua pulled the blinds down over the window of the kitchen so the light was dimmed a bit. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah I do, c’mere,” Joshua said, plucking the glass from Kaidan’s hand so he could set it aside and pull him close. Kaidan snuggled against him, resting his forehead on his shoulder. “You want to eat?”

Kaidan shook his head.

“Why don’t you start with toast or something?” Joshua offered, resting his head against Kaidan’s.

“Think I’m gonna be sick…” he complained.

“Yeah, probably because you haven’t had anything to eat and you just drank coffee and took pain medication.”

He felt Kaidan’s hand thump against his chest. “Stop making long sentences,” he complained. Joshua stayed quiet, just holding Kaidan and nuzzling his head against him softly. “Mmm…but it smells good.”

“It’s not making you feel sick?” Joshua asked, surprised. Nauseous was definitely one of the more common symptoms of Kaidan’s migraines.

“Maybe I should eat a bit,” Kaidan muttered.

“We can eat on the couch and you can sleep afterwards, okay?” Joshua ran his hand up and down Kaidan’s back, feeling terrible for him. Kaidan nodded.

“I’ll try.”

So Joshua parted from Kaidan, though he really didn’t want to, and set about making two plates for them. He strained the spinach and Kaidan watched over his shoulder in silence as he portioned the salmon, potatoes, and mushrooms into a plate each. He gave Kaidan a lot more than him despite his previous complaints. He needed more food, and Joshua knew it. He was starting to look a bit too thin, despite his ever present and enticing muscles.

“You actually did a pretty good job,” Kaidan commented.

“Careful there, I could still screw up,” he replied, noting Kaidan was probably feeling better if he was playing. He turned with both his and Kaidan’s plates in hand and motioned with his chin for Kaidan to head back into the living room.

“I can carry my own plate you know,” Kaidan told him, frowning, but then he turned to the door anyways.

“You’re sick, I’ll do anything to help you feel better.”

Kaidan tossed an affectionate look at him over his shoulder and said, “I know,” before he disappeared out of the kitchen into the darkness of the living room. Joshua followed him, kicking the door to the kitchen shut and setting the plates on the table as he got to the couch. He turned on the fireplace simulation under the TV, on low so that it wouldn’t be too glaring, enough that they could see.

Kaidan sat beside his giant pile of pillows and Joshua sat beside him as they ate in silence. Joshua watching to make sure that Kaidan ate _something_ even though he mostly picked at his meal before leaving half of it and pushing his plate away long after Joshua had finished his.

“Stay here,” Joshua told him softly, taking up both of their plates and returning them to the kitchen. He put Kaidan’s food in a container, the set courtesy of Liara when they’d moved in because she ‘knew that boys wouldn’t buy them for themselves,’ and put it in the fridge.

When he got back Kaidan was slumped over on the couch again, Joshua smiled down at him as he reached the end of the couch. Kaidan beckoned him with his hand and he went over to him.

“Pillow,” Kaidan muttered.

“Yeah, you have about fifty of them.”

“No, come here and be my pillow,” Kaidan reiterated irritably. Joshua chuckled softly, watching as Kaidan sat up, pushed the pillows off of the couch and pointed to the spot while looking up at him. Joshua sat, and took one of the pillows to put on his lap just to make it a bit softer. Kaidan lay back down and rested his head over his lap, nuzzling down into the pillow and staring into the fireplace for a moment before he closed his eyes.

“Okay?” Joshua asked. Kaidan nodded. “Then try to sleep, okay?”

“Could you massage my temple?” Kaidan asked, a whine creeping into his voice. Joshua smiled gently down at him.

“Whatever you need, love,” he told him, running his three middle fingers gently over Kaidan’s temple and massaging gently. “And I’ll give you a back massage later if you need it.”

“Mmm…definitely need it,” Kaidan mumbled. Joshua could tell he was already falling asleep, which was a good sign because it meant that the pain had subsided for the most part.

He continued to circle his fingers over Kaidan’s temple softly until his breathing evened out, and then he rested his elbow on the arm of the couch and leaned on his hand. The dim lighting, coupled with almost hypnotic movements of the fire, lulling him to sleep as well.

They both fell fast asleep on the couch, with the simulated fire's light dancing over them.


End file.
